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We associate illness with something unpleasant and often dangerous, and for good reason. But there are also diseases that at first glance one would like to compare with superpowers.
website learned about rare diseases that not only make scientists break their heads, but also make people look like comic book characters.
1. Super memory
In addition to people who do not respond to pain, there are people who are absolutely indifferent to the cold. For example, Wim Hof is a Dutchman who baffled doctors with his ability to calmly endure very low temperatures. He survived 120 minutes in a tube of cold water and ice, climbed Mont Blanc in shorts and even swims under the ice of frozen reservoirs.
The most famous patient is the "fearless woman", the American S. M. (she was given these initials to maintain anonymity). As soon as the researchers did not try to scare her: they gave her poisonous spiders and snakes, showed horror films and locked her in a "haunted house" - all attempts were in vain.
Moreover, S. M. spoke about terrible situations that did not frighten her: an attack with a knife in a park at night, a case of domestic violence, after which she miraculously survived. The head of the research team thought it was surprising that the woman was still alive at all, because she had lost the ability to assess danger.
10 outstanding personalities who influenced the course of history, transformed our understanding of the world and the perception of the meaning of man in it, his endless possibilities and power. 10 representatives of different eras and generations, various professions - from politicians and musicians to physicists and brilliant military strategists, from show business representatives to spiritual mentors. Their life and biography will always be the object of research and scientific interest, but despite the fact that the mystery of their unique abilities has not yet been fully disclosed, there is one quality that unites them all - a phenomenal memory.
10. Nikola Tesla (1856 - 1943) - inventor, physicist and engineer, widely known for his contribution to the creation of devices that operate on alternating current. Tesla had a "photographic memory" and rarely took advantage of the need to write down anything. It is said that in 1885, when his laboratory burned down, he was able to reconstruct many of his inventions from memory.
9. Theodore Roosevelt (1858 - 1919) - 26th President of the United States and Nobel Peace Prize winner for 1906 (for mediation in the conclusion of the Russo-Japanese Peace of Portsmouth). Roosevelt honed his memory skills by reading two or three books a day and then retrieving all the details from memory. He was also endowed with the unique ability to do several things at the same time. According to the stories, he could work with two secretaries and, at the same time, read a book.
8. Sergei Rachmaninov (1873 - 1943) - an outstanding Russian composer, conductor and one of the greatest pianists of all time. Photographic memory allowed him to memorize notes with incredible speed. It is said that he could easily memorize several passages from complex pieces of music.
7. Kim Peak (1951 - 2009) - the prototype of Dustin Hoffman's hero from the film "Rain Man" (1988, USA), an American with a phenomenal memory, remembered up to 98% of the information read. In his lifetime, Peak memorized over 9,000 books and could read two pages at a time.
6. Pope John Paul II (1920 - 2005) - spiritual mentor and head of the Catholic Church from 1978 - 2005. John Paul II also had a photographic memory. His ability to pay attention to details allowed him to learn 21 languages and speak fluently more than 100 different dialects.
5. Ferdinand Marcos (1917 - 1989) - the disputed president of the Philippines from 1965 - 1986. Marcos had a phenomenal memory. Without much effort, he memorized complex texts, could recite any chapter of the Philippine Constitution of 1935, and once he read a long speech, he was able to recite it by heart.
4. Marilu Henner (1952 - present) - actress, producer and author of the TV show Taxi. Henner is one of twelve people on the planet who has an incredible amount of memory (hyperthymesia). Exceptional memory allows her to recall the smallest details from childhood, up to baptism in infancy.
3. Julius Caesar (100 BC - 44 BC) - Roman commander, rightfully considered one of the greatest military leaders in the history of the formation of the Roman Empire. Legend has it that Caesar knew each of the 25,000 soldiers in his army by sight.
2. Mary Elizabeth Bowser (1839 -?) Civil War heroine, spy for the Union army. Working as a domestic worker in the home of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, Bowser memorized and passed on valuable information to the Union.
1. Bonaparte Napoleon (1769 - 1821) - the first emperor of France, a talented military leader who gained fame during the French Revolution. Napoleon had an extraordinary memory. He could memorize countless people, maps, and troop dispositions. His talent allowed him to act quickly and develop win-win strategies, anticipating the actions of the enemy several steps ahead.
A locksmith from Lipetsk, A.V. Nekrasov, can mentally extract roots of a degree from two to a thousand from numbers consisting of ... several hundred digits. Before counting, it is prepared (concentrated) for several tens of minutes. At the same time, he begins to shake his head. Then he asks to show a tape with numbers, stares at them intently, and after 20 seconds, looking into space, begins to dictate the answer. He names the first five digits correctly, and the sixth is the result of rounding off subsequent digits.
Nekrasov explained: the answer numbers appear to the mind's eye "in the form of numbers in balls." Experiments confirm that he owns telepathy, telekinesis.
JUST HEARING ONCE…
Once A.K. Glazunov (1865 - 1936) came to the composer S.I. Taneyev (1856 - 1915) to play him a newly written piece of music. Taneyev, who loved to play a joke, had previously hidden Sergei Rachmaninov, then a student at the conservatory, in another room. When Glazunov finished playing, Taneyev called Rachmaninoff. The young man sat down at the piano and, to the author's great surprise, repeated his entire composition. The composer was puzzled: no one had yet seen the notes of the work. The thing is that Rachmaninoff could reproduce from memory a melody heard only once.
WITHOUT PROMPTER
The great Russian singer Fyodor Ivanovich Chaliapin (1873 - 1938) did not limit himself to studying only his vocal part when staging the opera. He kept in mind the entire score of the opera and knew all of its solo, choral and orchestral parts. His stage partners claimed that he never used the services of a prompter. For example, in Mussorgsky's opera Boris Godunov, Chaliapin knew by heart all the male and female parts: Godunov, Shuisky, Pimen, the Pretender, Varlaam, Marina Mnishek. He had to perform the parts of Boris, Pimen and Varlaam at different times.
BLINDLY ON 32 BOARDS
The first Russian world chess champion Alexander Alekhin (1892 - 1946) had an extraordinary memory capacity. He remembered and could reproduce any of the games he had played before. In 1932 Alekhine gave a session of simultaneous blind play on 32 chessboards.
9 BOOKS A DAY
Nikolai Alexandrovich Rubakin (1862 - 1946) - a famous Russian educator, bibliographer, writer and publicist - lived 84 years. He had a talent for extremely fast reading. Rubakin himself claimed that during his adult life he read about 200 thousand books. If we consider that he began to read from the age of ten, it turns out that he read an average of 9 books a day.
"THE MAN WHO REMEMBERS EVERYTHING"
So the doctors called a reporter from one of the Moscow newspapers Shereshevsky, who easily memorized tables with a huge number of numbers, large combinations of words in an unknown language, complex formulas (by the way, what he did not understand, he remembered much easier than meaningful).
Shereshevsky was under scientific observation for about 30 years, starting in 1926. Experiments were invariably recorded. Shereshevsky could memorize colossal amounts of information. It also turned out that his memory is absolute in terms of memorization strength: after 20 years he was asked to reproduce the once heard table of numbers, Shereshevsky closed his eyes, slowly moved his finger through the air and named all the numbers in the table without a single mistake. This is an absolute record of "prescription of memorization".
Shereshevsky had eidetism - a kind of visual memory. When the numbers were dictated, he saw them written in his clear hand on a blackboard or paper, and they were arranged in columns of 4-6 in a row. Memorizing the words, he usually mentally took a walk from Pushkinskaya Square along Gorky Street to the center and “arranged” everything he heard along the way. When playing a series, he seemed to repeat the route, "reading the images."
IN THE MIND… THE TABLE OF LOGARITHMS
Director of the Institute of Semiconductors of the USSR Academy of Sciences, Academician A.F. Ioffe (1880 - 1960) used tables of logarithms from memory, in which there are 30 million digits.
READ A BOOK IN A MINUTE
Ira Ivanchenko, a 16-year-old from Kiev, achieved a reading speed of 163,333 words per minute with complete assimilation of what she read. This achievement was registered in January 1990 in the presence of journalists from a number of Ukrainian publications. Ira reached the record thanks to special training at the Kiev Center for Brain Development, which teaches the technique of fast reading. According to the students of the school, many people have a figurative perception of information when texts are perceived as an endless movie tape.
The unofficial reading speed record (416,250 words per minute) belongs to another 16-year-old from Kiev, Evgenia Alekseenko. The record was set on September 9, 1989 during testing under the direction of the Center in the presence of 20 course participants. In order to fully read, for example, such a magazine as Novoye Vremya, Zhenya needed only 30-40 seconds. It took her about a minute to read a book of medium format ... Zhenya retold the contents of what she had read for hours, without missing the slightest detail.
IN 38 LANGUAGES
Yu. A. Solomakhin, editor of the international department of the Sovetsky Sport newspaper, speaks fluently in 38 languages, among which there are quite rare ones, such as Faroese and the language of the Lusatian Serbs, which is spoken by representatives of one of the nationalities of Germany.
Daily training, listening to radio broadcasts in languages and translation work help him maintain his linguistic form. Solomakhin believes that his capabilities are not the limit, and even a person with average abilities can master 50 or more languages.
WONDER COUNTER
Aron Chikvashvili lives in the Van region of Georgia. He freely manipulates multi-digit numbers in his mind. Somehow, friends decided to test the capabilities of the miracle counter. The task was severe: how many words and letters will the announcer comment on the second half of the football match "Spartak" (Moscow) - "Dynamo" (Tbilisi). At the same time, the tape recorder was turned on. The answer came as soon as the announcer said the last word: 17,427 letters, 1835 words. It took five hours to check. The answer turned out to be correct.
CALENDAR MAN
In a matter of seconds, having carried out hundreds of operations in his mind, Vladimir Kutyukov is able to report that January 1, 180 was Friday. He will immediately answer the question of how many seconds have passed from the time of Nero's death to the fall of Constantinople, or what day October 13, 28448723 will be ... And all this, taking into account leap years, the change of the calendar in 1582, etc. difficulties, including non-decimal ratios (a week of seven days, a day of 24 hours, an hour of 60 minutes).
The unique abilities of the oral calendar calculus, which the engineer from Yoshkar-Ola showed, are confirmed by the protocol of the test carried out on May 18, 1992 in the experimental design bureau of control and automation devices of the Mari capital.
MR MEMORY
So journalists called the Yerevan lawyer Samvel Gharibyan. During an experiment in June 1990, he memorized and almost accurately reproduced 1000 unfamiliar foreign words offered to him. Without knowing the languages, Samvel managed to memorize and reproduce from memory words in Arabic, Urdu, Khmer, Bengali, English, Dari, German, Esperanto, Italian at once.
Having achieved amazing success in mnemonics (the art of memorization), Gharibyan helped develop the memory of thousands of people of various professions. Almost all of our memories from early childhood are related to emotions, but as we grow older, they become blunted. Samvel, with the help of special psychological techniques, helps to resurrect emotions and put them at the service of a person when working with information.
A large role in the methodology is given to breathing exercises that promote memory concentration. S. Gharibyan travels a lot on invitations from different countries, demonstrating his capabilities and methods. He created the Correspondence "School of Memory", which can be studied by any person who seeks to develop their ability to memorize.
The ability to forgive is a virtue, but not many of us have everything in order with the ability to forget. “We have forgiven you, but we cannot forget,” it sounds paradoxical, but sometimes memories settle so deeply in the depths and that they turn life into torment. The heroine of the film about 50 first dates is seen by a person with a too good memory happy.
The mind of a person with a disturbed forgetting process is like a computer hard drive that is actively filled but never cleaned. In such a repository of information, everything is delayed - dates, patronymics, numbers of cars accidentally seen, details of the daily ration of one's own and someone else's. Today we have the stories of four US citizens who in the 21st century are officially recognized as people with a phenomenal memory. This is not a gift, it is a disorder that aggravates the days of life, usually developing against the background of acquired obsessive-compulsive disorder or congenital autism.
The Neurobiological Center at the University of California is in a hurry to introduce you to the four best data collectors of the Homo sapiens system.
- Bob Petrella
The ability to remember numbers and dates gave Bob Petrell the career he was mentally prepared for. Today he runs a television channel showing tennis, and at the same time, of course, he remembers the results of all the more or less important tennis competitions. Bob can be shown any "frozen" fragment of a match involving his favorite baseball or football team, and he will tell you what kind of match it was, when, and how it was played.
Petrella says that from the age of 5 she remembers everything. All pin codes and phone numbers remain in a separate piggy bank of memories. Bob, for example, remembers that he lost his mobile phone on September 24, 2006, but there was not a single number in the phone's memory, since Petrella keeps them all in his head.
- Jill Price
More often than the other three "", Ms. Jill Price from California, who from the age of 14 remembers her whole life in detail, got on the screens and pages of the media. It began after physical trauma and mental exhaustion during a move from the East to the West of the United States. To Jill herself, her painful gift resembles some kind of disgusting video camera that you have to carry with you all day and night. In the process of remembering something you need or not, rewind to the required fragment is turned on. During the years of severe war in the conditions of the disconnected Internet, Ms. Price could become a legendary spy and savior of the world.
Jill Price lives far from Hollywood, leads a non-public life, working in a Jewish religious school. Parties in her life happen infrequently, so it is always a pleasure for Ms. Price to surprise guests with her phenomenal knowledge. At the same time, according to Jill, living with a load of unpleasant memories (and who doesn't?) is a painful fate.
- Kim Peak
The prototype of the Rain Man, the late Kim Peak lived with a damaged cerebellum, therefore he was considered crazy. Several other congenital brain anomalies took away Peak's ability to forget. From what he read (for 8 seconds spread of the book), Kim Peak memorized up to 98% of the information, verbal and digital. By the age of 7 he knew the Bible by heart, by the age of 20 - the complete collection of Shakespeare.
Damage to the cerebellum in the walking encyclopedia was apparently due to a gene mutation. As happens in such cases, the keeper of a phenomenal memory did not walk well (his gait was very strange), he could not tie his shoelaces or fasten them. All the "drivers" of this walking computer were aimed at scanning and remembering what the eyes see and hear the ears. Over time, however, in his declining years, Peak managed to learn how to fasten and play the piano.
The prototype of Rain Man Kim Peak was not sick with "fashionable" autism, just as another movie character without a prototype did not suffer from it - mathematician Max Cohen from the movie "Pi", who was hunted by Orthodox Jews with sidelocks and machine guns. At the end of the film, tired of his gift, Cohen drills a hole in his head and becomes a free man, as he is no longer tormented not only by fanatics, but also by headaches.
And two more people living today live with an officially registered diagnosis of "hyperthymesia" (i.e. "excessive memory"). This is Brad Williams and Rick Baron, both from the USA.
Americans say that for every Jill Price there is a Brad Williams. The Americans are referring to the radio host from Wisconsin, who, unlike Jill, is not a burden on super-memory. Mr. Williams brags about it at every opportunity. If you ask him what happened on August 31, 1986, Brad will remember that on this day the Admiral Nakhimov drowned and the sculptor Henry Moore died.
Mr. Williams remembers very well which day it snowed and which day there was a thunderstorm, what and when he ate for breakfast or dinner. On the TV show Good Morning America! Brad Williams has been called the "Google Man".
Once, thanks to his impractical talent, Brad almost won the American version of the TV show "Own Game". They say that he fought on sports matters. Unlike Bob Petrell, Williams does not like sports, and his deepest knowledge is filled with, for example, the history of pop culture. The “Google man” tells doctors that he does not see anything supernatural in his abilities.
Unlike his fellow hyperthymesians, Cleveland resident Rick Baron uses his genius to make money. Being officially unemployed, Baron takes part in all kinds of television championships in erudition.
Constantly winning, Rick Baron receives discount cards, tickets to sporting events as rewards, 14 times he traveled on vacation packages won to distant lands. Baron claims to remember everything from the age of 11. Moreover, he retrospectively remembers the daily chronicles of everything that happened to him from the age of seven.
The chronic pageant winner's sister believes that Rick has a severe obsessive-compulsive disorder. This lies in the fact that Mr. Baron tries to streamline and catalog everything around him. In addition, the owner of super-memory does not allow anything to be thrown away and neatly stores all paid bills and redeemed tickets for sports matches.
